WE WERE STUCK THERE, TREED AND FRAZZLED LIKE CATS
signed for another stint on the understanding
that he'd go to a new national park in the Cen
tral African Republic, near its borders with
Chad and Sudan. The park, known as Manovo
Gounda St. Floris, was then just wishful lines
on a map. The lines encircled an area rich with
elephants, black rhinos, and other big mam
mals, a vast region of savanna over which the
government exerted virtually no control. This
was where Fay began to-what's the right
phrase? Go AWOL? Step off the ranch? Dis
appearinto nowherefor long periods?-let'ssay
leaven his more focused scientific work with
wildcat exploratory journeys. He had a Suzuki
125 trail bike from the Peace Corps, and, since
the park's landscape was flat, he began putting
the vehicle to unauthorized use.
"I decided that the way to really see that
place was to take long traverses from one road
to another, sometimes 70 or 80 kilometers
across the places where no one had ever been.'
Too many field biologists, in his judgment,
never venture far from their base camps. Fay
rejected such tethering; he hungered to see
the wider scope and the interstitial details. He
would load the bike with extra fuel, a patch kit
for flats, two weeks worth of food, and go.
The Suzuki was a convenience soon dis
carded. Beginning in the late 1980s, when he
did his doctoral fieldwork on lowland gorillas,
tracking them through the forest with a Pygmy
mentor, Fay developed a habit of making his
long, restless explorations by foot. He discov
ered that by adapting his body and his outfit
(river sandals, one pair of shorts, and no shirt,
since bare skin is more easily washed and dried
than clothing) to local conditions, he could
cross flooded forests, streams, boggy clearings,
and swamps that most other people considered
impassable. He also learned he could walk into
a village or town virtually anywhere in central
Africa and, within a day or two, hire a crew of
men who were glad for the work
bags and making camps. Employ
ment was scarce, and he paid
better than most. He learned how
many men were required for
transporting this much scientific
equipment, that many tents, and
enough food to sustain them all
of carrying
Mike Fay an
Nick Nichols
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for, say, 20 or 25 days between points of supply.
By trial and error he developed a style of per
sonnel management that worked.
One element of that style was his imperious
sense of command. Another was that he never
asked any crewman to accept discomfort or
risk that he wouldn't accept himself. The histo
rian Plutarch, in his life of the Roman general
Marius, wrote that "there is nothing a Roman
soldier enjoys more than the sight of his com
manding officer openly eating the same bread
as him, or lying on a plain straw mattress, or
lending a hand to dig a ditch or raise a palisade.
What they admire in a leader is the willingness
to share their danger and hardship, rather than
the ability to win them honour and wealth,
and they are more fond of officers who are
prepared to make efforts alongside them than
they are of those who let them take things
easy." In Fay's case, it was manioc and salted
fish, not bread; a roll-out pad on the forest
floor, not a straw mattress; and a machete-cut
corridor through a blackwater thicket, in lieu
of a raised palisade.
When I asked him later about his blowup at
the black lake, he conceded that "it certainly
looked like I was pissed off, there's no doubt
about it." And yet he hadn't been, he said. It was
just another bit of tactical histrionics. From his
perspective (though he was too discreet to say
so), I had exacerbated the confusion myself
when Thony and I triggered the group swim.
He had intended to proceed methodically, but
my impatience foiled that. "I was simply taking
chaos and putting order into it. And the only
way to do that is to say, at the top of your lungs,
'Everybody stop! Everyone who is here present
stop! Do not move. Do not breathe. Stop. And
I'm going to tell you what to do.'"
Fair enough, though I didn't wait to be told.
I swam back to the east side of the lake, found
my own waterproof pack where I'd left it,
double-checked its seal for the sake of my note
book and binoculars, and swam
,',i'ii
out again to the thicket. By the
hotographer
time I got there, nudging the pack
arrate a multi-
ahead of me like a water polo ball,
ctive of the
the others had begun moving
it national
down Fay's corridor. The water
n/ngm/0108. here seemed to be eight or ten feet
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, AUGUST 2001